Working The Cannibal Angle

Michael Hedges December 22, 2011 Follow on Twitter

The public is confused. Business leaders are confused. Politicians are confused. With all that confusion, the best game going is something like Trivial Pursuit. Except in this game the winner eats the other players. Yumm!!

“I think we will look back on 2011 as the year when journalism triumphed itself to death,” observed Copenhagen Business School (CBS) media management professor Anker Brink Lund to Jyllands-Posten (December 18). “The amount of news has more than doubled in ten years, while the proportion of the population who cannot identify a single relevant news item from the last 24 hours has increased from approximately one-quarter to almost half.”

Media turned a corner in 2011, said Professor Lund. Call it navel-gazing or self-referential reporting or something else, this has been a special year for media reporting on media. One example he gave from Denmark was a newspaper’s editorial tirade about a television channel reporting a spin-doctor’s version of a story from Iraq.

Granted, there’s some meat to any news story about bad practice and, arguably, deception. Speaking of meat, this being the holiday eating season, how about that story reported this week (December 20) out of the Netherlands? Apparently two TV show hosts with youth-oriented channel BNN fried-up pieces of their own flesh and, well, you can see it on YouTube, of course. Cannibalism is not illegal in the Netherlands.

No media story better illustrates media trivializing itself than the News Of The World (NOTW) phone hacking saga in the UK. In recent weeks a special judicial inquiry has been taking evidence from the famous, the nearly famous and the famous for being famous telling how tabloid newspapers either ruined their lives or made them more famous. Tabloid journalists and editors, now infamous, have explained that journalism is a gritty, not-so-nice undertaking, sort of like undertaking.

Earlier in the year NOTW owner News Group Newspapers, owned by News International, in turn owned by News Corporation suddenly closed the tabloid hoping, perhaps, to get out of the headlines or simply control them. News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch and his son James then, before a parliamentary committee, provided even more theater when a shave-cream pie thrower doused the elder Mr. Murdoch only to be karate-chopped by Mrs. Murdoch. All this was live on TV. Nobody remembers the number of people arrested in the related investigations. Nobody even remembers the question.

One of the latest to appear before the Leveson Inquiry embodies the triumph of trivialization. Former tabloid editor turned TV talk show host Piers Morgan devoted 90 minutes of his precious time via video link (December 20). How very Hollywood. He knows nothing about anything illegal or too tawdry, paying someone to dive into Elton John’s rubbish bin notwithstanding. But if he did, investigators could read his two autobiographies. One must feel some compassion for Lord Justice Brian Leveson, looking into that mirror each morning, razor blade in hand, knowing he must face the media people.

News media has been blamed for trivializing the truly important for decades. News photos of the dead and dying in war zones lose impact with repetition. Tabloid publishers argue, correctly, that a well-turned headline and spicy language gives notice to topics many might ignore. As news media becomes more twitterized – 140 characters – all information is reduced to what can be digested in a blink. 

The great financial upheaval is truly the big story of 2011. All matters economic have received considerable media coverage, which has left many considerably confused. “Research shows the general public are worried about the financial crisis, but still don’t understand it,” said City University London financial journalism professor Steve Schifferes at a recent conference on journalism and the dismal science (December 16). “As financial journalists we need an in-depth knowledge of the banking and financial systems in order to really understand, interrogate and question the information we are given. We also need the ability to distil complex information into a format that is relevant to and can be understood by the general public.”

“The financial crisis started as a highly technical story which took months to go mainstream,” said Financial Times editor Lionel Barber keynoting the same conference. “Most reporters working in the so-called ‘shadow banking system’ found it hard to interest their superiors who controlled space on the front page or the air-time on the nightly news bulletin.”

Perhaps those editors can work cannibalism into those more challenging subjects. It should be easy. After all, in austere 2012 everybody will be eating everybody else.

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